Within the dim lighting of this exhibition space towers a six-meter-high “construction matrix,” stretching nearly to the ceiling. This semi-circular, domed form is both church- and cave-like, composed of polyhedral forms joined at three separate levels and adorned with Li Shurui’s now trademark black, white, and gray “dot paintings” of varying sizes. These paintings, 106…

YOU DON’T KNOW Luo Baobei? Impossible. Those who regularly find themselves in Chaoyang district cannot help but notice the little girl with those neat bangs, those round eyes, that cutesy sneer. Around the CCTV building in the Central Business District, Sanlitun SOHO, the Bird’s Nest, the Water Cube… After two or three years of work,…

Over the past several years, Huang Yuxing’s works have undergone continuous, linear change, both in terms of their composition and their themes. Beginning with his “Keyhole” series, Huang left audiences with an impression that was often somber, through works marked by emotional doubt and private inquiry. Then, with the unfolding of key personal and global…

“I regard these paintings more as information bulletins reporting on this particular period of my life,” Liu Xiaohui writes in the introduction to this exhibition. Life has certainly been the central theme in Liu’s recent work, and a narration of its ordinariness and accidental nature clearly guides the style of this series of paintings. In…

In 1862, inside a poorly-lit studio, Paul Cézanne put the finishing touches on his latest canvas, a self-portrait. Outside, all across Europe, a different method for image-creation was taking the continent by storm. The appearance and steady advancement of photography completely overturned painting’s representational dominance, and redefined the economic value of a portrait. It turned…

In England, 2012 is a year of celebratory cheer: the sixtieth-year jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign coincides with the upcoming London Olympics. But in the photo series “London Pictures,” bad boys Gilbert & George lead us through a city that is grim and chaotic, belonging to criminals and the deranged. Gray and beige have…

The Liyuan Library is a reading and relaxation space for visitors to and residents of Jiaojiehe village, part of Yanqi township in Beijing’s Huairou district. The building is 170 square meters in area, with a main room 30 meters long, 4.35 meters wide, and 6.3 meters tall. Funding for its construction— built between January and…

The Park Avenue Armory has been New York’s “secret art armory” for four or five years now. Every year there are a few unconventional programs of exceptional scale from art world heavy hitters. From Christian Boltanski’s gigantic installation No Man’s Land, to Ariane Mnouchkine’s marathon play Les Éphémères, to Peter Greenaway’s multimedia epic Leonardo’s Last…

To a Chinese audience, the story of contemporary Egyptian history that Moataz Nasr wove through the exhibition was a strange and unfamiliar one. The artist was too focused on links between China and Egypt that transcended the language barrier, from the police barrier at the exhibition entrance to the 32 blue-and-white porcelain vases spread out…

QIN QI HAS done fewer and fewer large-scale works over the past two years, essentially changing his form of practice since the art world first became familiar with him. Looking back to the start of 2005, Qin’s large-scale works appeared frequently in all sorts of contemporary art exhibitions. At that time, regardless of whether the…

DONGJING SPRING 东京 · TOKYO Amidst an epic downpour earlier this week, we found ourselves in the back of a ten-seat Toyota van, bound from Shibuya for Tokyo’s western suburbs. Our host and driver, a Ji…

“Forget Fear” reads the title of the 7th Berlin Biennale— curated by Polish artist Artur Zmijewski and his co-curatorial team, consisting of Polish art historian and curator Joanna Warsza and, from a distance, Russian activist-artist group Voina— but the more prosaic question behind this motto was what “art can do for real politics.” In a…

Born in Berlin in 1934, Hilla Becher first started collaborating with Bernd Becher in 1959, taking photographs of the water towers, blast furnaces, cooling towers, and other industrial structures that are legacies of Germany’s industrial era. Cataloging them according to type, Hilla and Bernd became pioneers of the field of industrial photography. In the years…

It would be easy to view the artistic practice of Lee Kit as a quaint celebration of the quotidian side of life, or perhaps as a pensive homage to the everyday carried out through a mute interplay of found objects placed within a space. In this sense it resembles so much global arte povera seen…

1. EDDIE PEAKE “Everyone just can’t stop talking about Eddie Peake!” was the slightly obnoxious maxim repeatedly uttered around London this past March. Indeed, the young artist’s work was featured in multiple well-known galleries in the British capital, some only blocks away from each other. In March alone, Peake launched a solo exhibition at Cell…

In Michael Lin’s work there is a consistent allusion to the relationship between people and their environment. The departure point is in his observation and intuition towards a particular setting. Gradually the works initiate a dialogue at the conjunction between the institutionalization of art spaces and the environments of the “everyday.” So what does this…

The nightlife of Beijing is remarkably lackluster. Long-term foreign residents, bored stiff, often find themselves in search of a little entertainment. These laowai come in all stripes, and the good are mixed in with the bad. Of the various diversions they devise for themselves, one form is particularly noteworthy: “foreign salons” (yang shalong). On the…

AT UNIVERSITY, GUO Hongwei was obsessed with analyzing the different styles of brushwork techniques corresponding to different periods of art history. But shortly after, he began attempting to abandoning them. From 2005 to 2007, Guo’s oil paintings mostly drew inspiration from his and his relatives’ childhood photographs. Regardless of whether these photos were in color,…

Just as their George Street neighbors had nearly forgotten the fact that the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) was under renovation, at the start of fall the MCA finally reopened after more than one year. Bustling with street performers on a daily basis, the Sydney Harbour celebrated the reopening with a week-long series of…